W. Edwards Deming's revolutionary management ideas brought about a complete turnaround at companies like Ford, Xerox and General Motors. His name is legendary in Japan for the role he played in reinvigorating their industries after World War II. But American managers, many of them looking for a quick-fix recipe for success, undertook the Deming method as if it were a simple management plan. What they failed to recognize was that the Deming method is a philosophy - and calls for radical changes in how we think about everything we do. It represents a holistic worldview and not the fragmented, analytical approach westerners are most comfortable with.
In Thinking About Quality, Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason, who worked with Dr. Deming for over a dozen years and are the authors of Quality or Else and its companion PBS series, take readers through the basic tenets of Deming's ideas, which for the first time are interpreted as much more than a list of things to do. They describe the changes that must be undertaken in order to practice Deming effectively; they show managers how to view the Deming method, how to interpret it and use it - and, most important, how to think about it.
The authors' extensive research and investigation of companies and agencies using Deming has helped them isolate the "devils" that prevent American managers from fully integrating the kind of radical change required by philosophies such as Deming's. They address the core of Deming's beliefs, what he called Profound Knowledge, as the authors write, "until you are acquainted with Deming's philosophy, you have little or no hope of understanding what he is doing or why he's doing it, or, how your organization might improve." Dobyns and Crawford-Mason also explore how Americans have historically viewed systems and help managers place the Deming method within their own understanding of this concept.
And they draw the most useful connection so far between Deming's famous 14 Points and the seven criteria of the Malcolm Baldrige Award, on which the federal government's effort to reinvent itself will be based, business contestants are judged, and future educational reform may be modeled. Using examples ranging from a New York inner-city high school to the U.S. Department of the Navy, they show how Deming's ideas can work in areas such as education, health care, government and the press.
. Thinking About Quality is an in-depth discussion of one of the most important thinkers of our time.
